| International Festival Signs of the Night - Bangkok |
lnternational Festival Signes de Nuit - Bangkok |
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11th International Festival Signes de Nuit - Bangkok - July 11-20, 2025
23th International Festival Signs of the Night - Thailand
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Bangkok - The Spirit of Opening
The Festival Signs of the Night - The Spirit of Independence
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Christian Frei |
Suisse / 2025 / 2:02:00 |
When the world is engulfed by the COVID-19 pandemic, three scientists who long predicted its arrival must battle not only the virus but also a wave of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and political blame that threatens to eclipse the truth. This is their story. Part investigation, part thriller, Blame investigates the relationship between science, politics and the media.
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JURY DECLARATION
Amid global confusion and suspicion over Covid-19's origin, this film offers the true story by following three scientific bat experts. The film excels in both investigative journalism and passionate documentary filmmaking. It should be compulsory viewing in every school, especially in an era of conspiracy theories and skepticism about science.
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Mauro Bucci |
Italy / 2023 / 1:15:37 |
An engaging journey through Gambia, Finland, and Italy, following the story of Essa, a former UN soldier and refugee, and his struggle to achieve well-being for himself and his loved ones. The film explores how the protagonist successfully established a business in Europe to financially help his village in Africa: Bureng. However, the outbreak of the Coronavirus gravely challenges Essa’s privileged position and his family's stability, leading him to one of the most serious crises of his life. "The Strong Man of Bureng" is both a contemporary odyssey and an intimate story of the deep motivations that have brought a person to leave his own country in an effort to satisfy universal needs.
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JURY DECLARATION
The film presents a complex portrayal of the life of an African emigrant in Europe, a narrative that likely resonates with millions of other migrants across the globe. The film's ambiguity allows viewers to develop either sympathy or antipathy towards the protagonist and thereby serving as a self-reflection for the viewers themselves.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
n from a long-standing friendship with the protagonist, Essa, the film was profoundly shaped by the impact of the COVID outbreak, which disrupted his life and significantly transformed the project itself. It explores the invisible web of ties between migrants, their families, and their homelands — a force that silently shapes the dynamics of African-European migration.
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SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award for Documentary honors films, which express in an original, convincing and sensitive way the perturbing aspects of reality.
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The Farc Guerrilla, a History of the Future
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Pierre Carles |
France / 2024 / 02:24:00 |
Under the auspices of Rio Chiquito, Bruno Muel and Jean-Pierre Sergent’s 1965 report on the birth of the FARC, and Dunav Kuzmanich’s 1981 fiction film Canaguaro about the end of the Liberal guerillas, this is look back on 70 years of clandestine life in the Columbian forest. Women and men who took up arms amid profound social inequality and political violence recount their years as fighters and their return to civilian life, without disowning their past. From 2012, when the peace negotiations began, to 2022 — the story of a new struggle.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
Amidst the ceasefire, disarmament, or whatever vocabulary should be used to describe the process in 2016 Colombia, Pierre Carles’ feature documentary was there at the very heart of it. Not only tracing back the revolutionary spirit through Rio Chiquito (1966), Canaguaro (1981) and other archival materials, the film was also facing the inconvenient aftermath out of the woods - with humanistic, personal and political levels. Calm but longing with quiet sorrow, the cameras brought us in to witness lukewarm light left from the blazing fire of revolution once had an international attraction, on the course of becoming a chapter in the future’s history book.
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MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award for Documentary honors films, which express in an original, convincing and sensitive way the perturbing aspects of reality.
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Caroline D’hondt |
Belgium / 2024 / 1:22:00 |
In Inuit land, away from the world, Iqaluit is nevertheless a cosmopolitan city, because many people come from the four corners of the world to work in this capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut. A city where some 8,000 inhabitants live, a diverse microcosm in Arctic soil. Road to Nowhere invites you to travel the icy road that begins and ends in this place where many worlds coexist. A film which undertakes to cross doors literally and figuratively, to observe everyday events, the repetition of gestures and the habits of each person. Here, it is a question of capturing how life unfolds in the intimate and the ordinary, a sideways look that questions the presence of each person, the relationship to their roots and their future. A film that reveals itself as a canvas skilfully woven into a collective fresco on the edge of the world where the trivial, poetry and paradox intertwine.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
Followed a road to nowhere, ended up somewhere, completely and knowingly as an outsider. Road to Nowhere explores the dynamics of life within Iqaluit, capital city of the modern Inuit community. Frozen but not in time, gradual changes from the outside world seeping in, melting the ice and snow of traditional livelihood. The film managed to capture the cracking shells without falling into a romanticism trap. Through voices of the descendants and residents, it shows what colonialism has taken from indigenous people, and what will be further taken from the population in the name of climate crisis and capitalism.
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MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award for Documentary honors films, which express in an original, convincing and sensitive way the perturbing aspects of reality.
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The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for Mabel Dove
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Nnenna Onuoha |
Ghana, Germany 2024 / 0:14:56 |
In a post-apocalyptic world where archives have been destroyed, a young Black woman sets out in search of Mabel Dove, a writer from the past whose work inspires her. When neither a feminist bookshop nor a teacher of African studies can help her, she turns to the revisionists – underground historians – in whose cyber archive she finally finds Dove and spends an afternoon with her.
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JURY DECLARATION
Not a story of a time traveler, but rather an overlapping of parallel universes between two periods. This suggests an infinity of occurrences where inquisitive enthusiasm and curiosity play a major role in this kind of investigative story. It begins with a missing page in history, which was successfully approached using a virtual reality projector. The conceptualization of the original incident was initiated by literature.
Documentarian Nnenna Onuoha gives us a tale that will soon become a legend. She starts by posing questions like, "Who is the narrator of this story of discovery?" and "Did she actually exist?" These questions are designed to ignite curiosity among future generations, especially once her masterwork has become extinct and left in oblivion over time. |
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NIGHT AWARD
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The Night Award for Documentary honors films, which represent reality in an ambivalent and enigmatic way, avoiding stereotypes of representation
and simple conclusions.
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Basateen |
Antoine Chapon |
France/ 2025 / 0:24:41 |
In 2015, the Basateen al-Razi district of Damascus was razed to the ground as punishment for the population’s uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. This area is set to be replaced by Marota City, a modern and connected district featuring 80 skyscrapers. Ten years later, having lost everything, two former residents reflect on their neighborhood, where their homes and the oldest orchards in Damascus once stood. Through their testimonies and the repurposing of regime-produced 3D animations, memory is awakened and resists this deliberate erasure.
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JURY DECLARATION
Latent, but worth the patience, while we observe. Meanwhile, our subject-reporter is also being observed and under surveillance, with all his activities monitored. Documentarist Daniel Kötter commendably performs his duties with the highest effort, balancing his roles as a filmmaker and journalist. His work is marked by prudent, non-judgmental statements, even as his camera operates amidst the uncertainty and indecision of geopolitics among three sovereign nations. He exposes undiscovered situations that remain unexposed, unrevealed, and tightly controlled in terms of information and media. |
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JURY AWARD FOR MIGRATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
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Amir Ovadia Steklov |
Germany / 2024 / 0:13:59 |
Are Jewish people in Germany allowed to take a critical view of the war in Gaza? Or do they feel obliged to show solidarity with Israel? A/ mir wonders how he is perceived here as a peace-loving Jew. Infrared images offer the aesthetics of reversal. The invisible becomes visible, the visible alien. Noise-cancelling headphones momentarily silence the outside in favour of the inside. In the picture: the countdown from 24 to zero frames per second.
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JURY DECLARATION
The film's technical experimentation succeeds not merely as an end in itself, but also as a powerful medium for depicting the filmmaker's psychological state and the prevailing political and societal conditions. |
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Competition Short Film, Cinema in Transgression, Documentary |
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